When the middle class, America’s largest socio-economic sector, finds their discretionary spending seriously diminished, wages still sluggish and the wage gap between the haves and the have-nots widening there will very likely be civil unrest. If you add a pandemic forcing businesses to shut down and a skyrocketing death toll, that’s a recipe for disaster. Through his willing accomplices, Trump & republicans, Putin is destabilizing the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world.
But that’s not all. At the same time that we have a Russian asset in the presidency we also have one of our two political parties, the GOP, working to create civil unrest for its own purposes. Here’s how it happened: Decades ago a few wealthy republican/libertarians came up with a long-term plan to fundamentally change America in every way. They first aligned the GOP more solidly with corporate interests, the 1% and Russia. That was to supply the money they needed to implement their plan. Then they began engaging in activities with what were then considered outlier & extremist groups and helped them get political traction they never had before. They did that to get their votes. These were mainly the NRA, evangelicals & white supremacists. The GOP then brought them together as a political party. (See the book ‘Democracy In Chains’ by Nancy MacLean)
Those alliances are driving the GOP’s refusal to pass gun control laws, the push to make abortion illegal & to end same sex marriage. Those issues also have the extra added attraction of providing emotional flashpoints that further their objective of pitting Americans against each other to destabilize us as a nation. The point of destabilizing us dovetails with their plan to write a new Constitution. (See the WaPo article ‘The biggest Threat to Democracy that Nobody is talking About’ by Jonathan Capeheart, Sept. 4, 2018.)
At the heart of the republican plan to destroy America as we know it is the libertarian philosophy that if you can’t afford something, you can’t have it. For example the wealthy libertarians behind it (Kochs, Mercers, DeVos, Bannon, etc.) believe all education should be private. In other words they don’t want to pay taxes to support public education. Hence we had Betsy DeVos as Sec. of Education slowly and systematically defunding public education. Nor do they want their tax dollars to be used to subsidize healthcare, medicare, medicaid, welfare, SNAP (early childhood meal supplements) or any other social safety net.
Libertarianism is at the heart of the attempts to discontinue or privatize social security and all of the other social safety net programs. It’s why funding for Head Start programs dried up and it was behind the Trump administration’s efforts to deregulate and disregard EPA standards, to allow drilling offshore and in National Parks. The people behind this government takeover want 100% un-fettered capitalism, freedom to pollute at will and as far as I can tell, a two-tier society composed of the haves and the have-nots.
The flaw in their scheme is that if they are successful at severely reducing the buying power of the middle class (and that’s the trajectory we’ve been on) we won’t be able to afford what corporations are selling. That’s a big problem because a prosperous middle class is what propelled corporations to achieve great fortunes & made America the wealthiest nation in the world. Corporations are just beginning to understand this and put the brakes on the GOP’s single-minded attempts to impoverish the middle class. The bottom line is, a prosperous middle class is necessary to a healthy economy.
All of these manipulations and machinations by republican/ libertarians are being funded by wealthy libertarians as well as the Russian mob. If you look at the amount of money being spent to fund republicans’ campaigns you’ll see that it sharply escalated eighteen months to a year prior to Trump’s alleged victory in 2015-16. For example campaign donations to Mitch McConnell escalated into the millions from Russian oligarchs alone. (See “How Putin's oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns” Dallas Morning News, by Ruth May, 5/8/18.)
Putin’s game plan is as old as the hills. It’s called divide and conquer. It’s the same game libertarians are playing, they just aren’t as obvious. Or maybe they are. At any rate, if Trump is re-elected he will create more massive instability to further Putin’s and Libertarians’ causes.
At the heart of all of these activities, both domestic & foreign is money, enormous amounts of money. Money that has been flooding individual republican coffers. We all know there are plenty of people who will do anything for money. Several of them are Congressmen & women. When the CitizensUnited decision opened the floodgates for money is when we started losing control of our country.
So, as you may have guessed, the single most important thing to do is stop the flow of money corrupting our government. One obvious way to do that is to make all private campaign donations illegal and allow only public money to be used for campaigning. Public money is used to pay the salaries of all government employees, why not use it for campaigns? Every candidate should receive the same amount of public money. The FEC should collect receipts for campaign expenditures to make sure they match the amounts spent. When the public money has been spent, that’s it. There is no more money. I realize it’s more complicated than that, but I’m certain it can all be worked out. The problem is having enough people in Congress to vote for a campaign funding scheme using only public money.
Frankly, it’s astonishing how well America is doing considering all of the above. But, make no mistake. We are not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. Not long ago I composed a tweet saying these difficulties will pass. Someone tweeted back asking me how I knew that and my response was, I know it because I’ve studied history. What we’re experiencing is a cultural aberration, you could even call it a fad, but that implies an inappropriate superficiality & this is anything but superficial. If you know anything about quantum entanglement (what Einstein called “Spooky action at a distance”) you know we are all connected. That connection is why we are seeing a worldwide resurgence of authoritarianism.
Here’s the thing, it WILL pass, but we do have a choice. We can allow ourselves and our country to sink to the same level of depravity as Hitler’s Germany, or we can resist with all our might. Then, one day, we can watch a fascinating movie telling the story of how we did it.